


what it means

by indoordisco



Series: the stormtroopers rebel [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Introspection, M/M, Potty mouthed BB-8, Recovery, Stormtrooper Rebellion, becoming human, unconventional pronouns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-04-18 12:12:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14212893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indoordisco/pseuds/indoordisco
Summary: BB-8 asks him what humanity means, one day. He sits. Thinks. “I guess it means alive?”“And how do you get that?”“Are you asking me how to be alive?”“Yes.”“You catch it off someone else.”“Infection? From what I understand, it is not a disease, Friend.”“No, I guess not. But I say you are alive and so you are. Isn’t that funny? How that works?”





	what it means

**Author's Note:**

> the idea of this gnawed at me until i wrote it and here we are. this is less a cohesive plot and more just a bunch of short bits about recovery and becoming human and also i took a lot of creative liberties in this because i read poe & finn’s Star Wars wiki and then went ‘ok let’s do this’ sooo
> 
> thank u to angel g for betaing this for me ur great kid
> 
> also as always read peradii’s works they’re like mine but two million times better and also pornier (sometimes)
> 
> this is roughly in the same universe as 'they have told you' but rey is just. not here? and also different pronouns for finn and a couple diff things? so u could read that if u want something more focused on other troopers and also not quite so depressing?

**POE**

His abuelo passes away when he’s five. He’s the last human who can speak an old earth language fluently, and his death means he loses all hope of ever learning Cubano properly. Still, he tries his best. Poe’s parents, rarely home from missions, teach him snippets they remember from their childhood, mixed in with the odd slang word or, when he’s a little older, swear words. His abuelo had a few books in Spanish, an old holodisc or two, but other than that he watches videos that are so old he has to track down a physical disc player.

The most his mother speaks in Cubano is the handful of lullabies she hums at nights. He sings them to himself sometimes, on the quiet bits of missions, filling the gaps in the words in with whistling. The songs are rough, the grammar messy, but they remind him of home, of Yavin-4, of the glowing flowers and purple trees. His father tells these grandiose stories about Luke Skywalker giving them this force sensitive sapling, and he never really believes them, but he still whispers the story to his ceiling sometimes.

He tries to teach one of the lullabies to BB-8 so that the droid will beep along with him, but it just snarls that it ‘isn’t just here for your entertainment, plane fucker.’ So he gives up on that pretty quickly.

Still, he persists in teaching as many words as he can to those around him, to keep the language as alive as he can. Sometimes he catches the other pilots swearing under their breath in Cubano, and once, he hears Jessika say ‘mi amor’ casually, which is the highlight of his week. He speaks it as much as he can, too, mumbling it in the seat of his X-Wing and gasping it during his occasional flings on the various rescued planets.

His mother teaches him to fly at 6, and he sits in the cockpit of her A-wing, shaking with nerves as she shows him what all the different buttons do. He nearly crashes it several times and doesn't have a perfect run until he's near on 8, but after that he gets it. And god, does he love it. The next year, his mother dies, and he learns to fly an X-Wing on his own, soaring through purple wildflower fields with tears streaming down his face. L’ulo helps raise him after that, his father away on missions, but the first and last time he tries to help teach Poe to fly, Poe flings himself out of the A-wing from 30 feet.

He breaks 6 bones and flies the next day.

 

 

He doesn't mean to, but somehow, he makes a habit of turning things into people. He reprograms BB-8 because Snap says he can’t without seriously fucking the droid up, so he tries. 

He sits and he tries to teach a robot that it is alive although he is not even sure of that. He says ‘you are’ to it so many times it stops meaning anything. He reprograms it so it has no programming, so it is alive. He tries to convince it that it does not need to fix itself because it is fixed and fixed means it is alive. It, uh, works better than he expects. He asks it what pronouns it wants as a test, and it beeps thoughtfully, and firmly says he.

He asks some of the pilots to teach BB-8 words, which in hindsight, was a stupid decision. Yolo teaches him to call Poe bantha fodder. It takes him 5 days to convince BB to stop.

But then there are lines of pilots, ones with bonds as close as his and BB-8s, asking him how he did it, how he made that unit become alive. He smiles but shrugs, because in reality, he does not know. He thinks it was at least partially due to BB-8.

They ask him to do the same and he has to shake his head, has to say, quiet, sacred, “You have to do it yourself. Your droid won’t be unless it wants to. You have to make it want to.”

 

  
BB-8 asks him what humanity means, one day. He sits. Thinks. “I guess it means alive?”

_And how do you get that?_

“Are you asking me how to be alive?”

 _Yes._  

“You catch it from someone else.”

_Infection? From what I understand, it is not a disease, Friend._

“No, I guess not. But I say you are alive and so you are. Isn’t that funny? How that works?”

_Thank you, Friend-Poe._

“For making you alive? No problem, compañero.” 

_If you are being rude, I have a great many weapons and am not afraid to use them._

Poe snorts. “It means friend. And you’re an astromech droid, BB. I know you don’t have weapons.”

BB-8 hums. _Compañero-Poe_. And then, almost as an afterthought, he flicks up his lighter.

Poe smiles.

 

 

He wakes from a dream and in his mouth he can taste the word brother. He had a sister once. He does not know if that means he is an only child now. If you lose a sister do you stop being a brother? Are his parents half parents? Is he an orphan?

Some days he can scarcely remember her, like he lost her scent and her voice and her face in the fog of his grief. She was two years younger than him, and she died a month after their father did. Her immune system was shitty, and then L’ulo came home from a mission with an interplanetary disease and her immune system couldn’t handle it. L’ulo left out of guilt and then he had to survive in a house in the middle of nowhere on Yavin-4. 

He went from a four-person family to a one person family in three years. 

He lives in his house and takes care of it as well as he can, but he has no money, not until he’s eighteen. He learns to limit the number of jobs he takes so no one suspects he lives on his own. He only buys food occasionally, so people won’t wonder why he's buying so little. He lives on food scraps, on the wiry hares he manages to trap in his back garden. He doesn’t cut his hair until it hits the bottoms of his shoulder-blades and he hacks it off to jaw length with a knife.

He turns 18 alone in the shell of his house with a candle he scrounged up and a bottle of wine that’s dusty and covered in cobwebs. 

A year later, he joins the New Republic Starfleet and spends a month waking up every night thinking his sister is there. He has to learn not to hunt for food. He has to learn not to ration the meals he is given. He can eat however much he wants, whenever he wants. He has to reprogram himself, he supposes. In his head he hears, over and over again, _do not let your hunger show. It will expose you._

He breathes deep and in his head, _he hears humans and wolves both have sharp teeth. Smile wide, kid. Do not let them see your hunger. It will expose you. Do not show the world you would eat it whole._  

He fights with this echoing in his head until it is no longer true, until he does not hunger so much, until he could not feel the spaces between his ribs and until none of his old clothes fit him anymore because he was not fourteen anymore and his shoulders were broad with muscle.

When he haltingly tells Jess this story, she asks him if that’s why he turns things into people so often.

He feels like he’s been punched.

“Because you had to do it for yourself?” She prompts carefully.

His face twists and he tries very very hard not to cry. She holds him as his shoulders shake.

 

 

He holds his hand over FN’s eyes and says, “Let me be your eyes. Trust me.”FN’s shoulders tense, but Poe reassures him. “This will help. I promise.” 

FN nods.

“What can you see, FN?”

It shrugs its shoulders. “Nothing. You have your hand over my eyes.”

Poe just holds back a sigh. “You’re not listening to me.” FN flinches and Poe smooths his hands down its sides. “What can you see?”

“I don’t understand.”

Poe slowly, calmly repeats, “What can you see?”

FN wheezes, a little like it’s having an asthma attack.

“Hey, easy buddy. Just breathe.”

“I can- I can-“ It hesitates, “I can see my childhood. I think. I do not know. Some days I remember waking up- that’s not the right word. I don’t know the right word.”

“I know what you mean. We might say born? Becoming alive?”

“I can remember becoming alive,” FN says firmly, like this is the one thing it knows. Perhaps it is the only thing it knows. “I do not remember being a child. First I remember I was-“ It hesitates, “probably a teenager. My body was. I don’t know how old I was.”

Poe shrinks in on himself a little but keeps his hands over FN’s eyes. “But you were a child, once?” FN shakes. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Hey. That’s okay. Keep going. Tell me what you see.”

 

 

**BB-8**

“Come on, bowling ball. Let’s go on this mission.” BB-8 feels like puking, if that was something he could do. Instead, he opts for letting a little black oil dribble out from between his head and his body. Friend-Poe looks at him and laughs. 

He learns Cuban Spanish from Friend-Poe. Mostly swearing, but still, he has a rough grasp of the language. He translates it into binary and then beeps it at inappropriate times to see if he can get Friend-Poe to laugh. Laughing is good. When Hux stumbles onto their ship on that disastrous mission, he beeps at Friend-Poe, as loudly as he can, _Comemierda_! 

Friend-Poe snorts and nods. “That he is, surly.”

BB-8 hisses. Friend-Poe laughs again.

 

 

Princess Leia explains love to him. He is not sure he understands why she does it. She sits cross- legged on the floor opposite him, her once young bones creaking.

She tells him the story of her childhood, and she tells him about Luke and Han and then she tells him about saving the world. She tells him about becoming General, and then she tells him about marrying Han. She tells him that Han forged their wedding ring out of her chains when she was Jabba’s servant.

BB-8 listens in silence.

And then she tells him about Ben Solo, and she cries. He does not know what to do. She tells him that she hadn’t cried in front of another person for years.

He beeps, _I’m honoured._

She laughs wetly. She says, quiet, “And after Han died- all I could think, all I could hear for weeks was, ‘Please help me my dead son killed my husband. He stopped being my son years ago and my husband stopped being married to me years ago but my dead son killed my husband.”

_It is not your fault, General._

She smiles. “I know, BB-8. But sometimes I don’t think my brain knows that.” 

_You must not believe completely then, General. Your brain is part of you._

She shrugs one shoulder, which he thinks is human for confusion. “Maybe,” she says.

 

  
“Aww, look at BB-H8 getting along with bowling ball.”

BB-8 hears this and rolls over, beeping indignantly. _What the fuck did you just call me?_

Friend-Poe laughs and laughs and laughs until he cries. “I called you bowling ball, and BB-9E I called BB-H8. You know, like you, but evil.”

_I get the joke, wanker._

Poe wheezes. “Now there’s an insult I haven’t heard in a while. Who taught you?” 

 _Jessika_. He beeps.

“I’ll thank her later.”

He huffs and rolls back to BB-9E, where they were talking about teaching humans droidspeak. She- Poe reprogrammed her a month after they picked her up off a First Order ship- beeps in greeting, and then laughs daintily with a sound like metal rattling when he tells her about Poe’s penchant for nicknames. He thinks he’s in love.

Mentally, he writes a note: _Talk to the General about ‘love’_.

 

 

BB-8 was never just a droid, not really, but nonetheless, there is a before, and an after. There is droid. Programming. Orders.

There is BB-8. There is force. Friend-Poe. A sense of alive, of indignation at the word 'machine'. He is not machine, not droid, he is BB-8. He was that before, but before he was a droid and now he is alive.

He had a number and now he has a life. A number. He is the same but not. He is no smarter just has more words (son of a bantha, Jedi fuck, shitehead). He is alive. Kind of.

 

 

Free will is a humanity thing. An alive thing. A thing with a conscience and no master looming overhead. He had no master except Poe, and even then he called him nothing but Friend. But a conscience, that was something that was there, deep, in the centre of his chest. So maybe, he was halfway to free will (and halfway to humanity, maybe)

 

 

BB-8 rolls into Friend-Poe’s room because he hears the distinctly human sounds of Friend-Finn crying. He rolls up to the bed pushed to the side and beeps sadly. 

Friend-Finn sniffs. “Hey.”

_What’s wrong?_

“I did some very bad things, BB-8.”

_I forgive you, Friend-Finn._

Friend-Finn makes a sound similar to choking. “That’s not how it works.”

 _I forgive you_. He nudges at Finn’s feet.

Friend-Finn puts its hand on BB-8’s head. It is mildly irritating but Friend-Finn is upset so BB will tolerate it.

 _I forgive you._ He beeps the same thing until Friend-Finn stops crying.

 

 

**FN-2187 (FINN)**

It had a number and now he has a name. Red blood, human blood dries black. On the white beetle shells of troopers, red blood dries red. There's a suit to wash today and the red (not quite human) blood washes away. But there's another suit tomorrow.

What it is trying to say is it had lots of jobs on the ships. Object, soldier, whipping post, janitor. Those imply a certain sort of person-ness. What it means is it had to do things, felt those jobs singing in its veins. What it means is it had no free will. What it means is it does not know what free will is.

Free will is a humanity thing. An alive thing. A thing with a conscience and no master looming overhead. Troopers don't have free will. Free will leads to error and besides they are not people, they are not alive. It supposes that they do have free will, it is just that they are not allowed to use it. There are just orders. Do not remove your helmet. Do not talk about the revolution. Follow orders. Shoot everything that moves unless ordered otherwise. So. FN-2187 does not have free will. What it means is that it is not human.

 

 

Trooper blood is red, so red. Violent. It dreams and it wakes and it knows its old squadron was discharged. It knows how their blood splattered. It feels hot red blood everywhere.

The next day it looks Poe in the eye and it is not sure he is human. It does not know if he bleeds red, if he bleeds human. How is anyone sure if they bleed human.

Poe asks him, quiet, worried, “And you? Tell me, do you bleed human?”

It shrugs and drags a nail down its forearm. Red blood wells. It thinks it is human but it does not know.

 

 

“Poe.” It is dark. It is always dark in space. This is not space. This is night.

“Yeah?"

“Am I a she?”

“I don’t know, do you want to be?”

“I don’t know what that means.” FN flinches slightly as he says this because it is admitting to weakness.

Poe flinches a little too. “Do you know what he and him mean?”

“I am it. They only ever called me it.”

Poe’s shoulders hunch up and Poe’s knees cross. “Oh.” Poe breathes. “I am he. Snap is he. Jessika is she. Rey is she. Yolo is they. You are-“ he pauses, “you are what you want to be.” 

“Can I be it?”

Poe’s forehead scrunches up. His mouth twists. FN does not know what that means. “Yeah, buddy. You can.”

 

 

Jessika calls FN he. It corrects her. She does Poe’s sad face. She says okay. She calls him it. 

 

 

It wakes and there is a gap. It does not remember anything between. Two fixed points. Saber, red hot, blood, red hot, numb. Waking, cold and gasping. Void in the middle. The problem with dying is time stops being a line and starts being a circle. The problem is remembering is not a process anymore. Everything is now then will be but all at once.

He dreams and there was sand in his teeth a week ago or maybe it was a month ago. He pries it from between his canine and the next tooth and tastes gritty Jakku, and sun and screaming and leather jackets and _run, run, they are coming_.

Soon, Leia Organa sits down next to him and cries. It is not sobbing, for she would never, but instead, she sat silently with tears streaming down her face. She says, quietly, “My son is dead.” 

And then, paused, a moment. “I cannot be a mother anymore. I must have stopped.”

He will sit, think. “Do you feel like a mother?”

“Yes.”

“Then you are one. I do not fight, anymore, but that doesn't mean I am not a soldier.”

 

 

The drowning will drag everyone down with them. FN-2187 is not drowning but it thinks of the phantom suit, the white plastic beetle shells, that maybe they are oppressive, maybe it is suffocating.

Its chest aches but there is nothing cutting its breath off except its own lungs.

It burns, like fire but also water filling its lungs. Behold, it is man and Phoenix. It holds its hand over a fire and it doesn’t burn. It dies. It comes back. It has medical grade steel in its spine which will melt when it dies. But it doesn’t burn so it thinks that it might be a while before it will die.

 

 

A nurse comes into its room yesterday. It looks at her and suddenly, tumbling from its lips is: “How long do I have left?”

The nurse looks confused. “Finn, you’re fine.”

“No, I’m dying. Can’t you see? How long do I have left?”

“I’m going to get Mr Dameron. Sit tight.”

It stands, abruptly, because it can because it does not have a master anymore (or it will not have a master soon? It is not sure.)

It wants the nurse to react, to be proud of its rebellion. He (or is it she? It does not know) has already left.

Poe is here. It sits down, heavy. “Hey, Finn.”

“I’m dying.”

Poe looks at the nurse. It thinks he is scared? The nurse shakes her (his?) head.

Poe sits. “You were. You’re not anymore.”

This is not right. Yes, that is true, but it knows that this is not the same. It shakes its head. “You’re not going to die, Finn.”

It laughs, a sound so foreign it shakes. “I am going to die, someday.”

 The problem with dying is it forgets what a human face looks like (somewhere in the circle of time) it thinks that its bones are too big for its skin. It thinks it is not human. It does not know what human looks like, anymore, but it knows it is not this.

 

 

FN stands on a salt cliff on Crait and just breathes. The fear grounds it. It is not supposed to be scared so this reassures it that it is alive. Fear is a good emotion. Human. Complex, something that requires thought beyond _shoot kill do not get killed but we will not mourn if you do you were not that much of an asset._

Sometimes it sits in its room with the cold grey metal of an old phaser in his mouth. It does not shoot anymore, Poe says. It stopped working years ago. But still. It holds its jaw open and it makes it feel grounded. Alive. Cold.

 

 

There are more of them now. Not as far along in recovery, which is an odd thing to say because it does not feel recovered, not even a little. It sits in the room, cross-legged in an ungainly sort of way and listens as the troopers cry. It is one of them but it does not speak because on days like these it wishes it could fight the blood in its veins.

It shakes, a little, in that way you do when everything is overspilling, overfull. Too much. It wants- it needs to explain, to say- “FN saved me and now it is dead. It never had a name, not proper, or maybe I just never knew it. I do not know how to explain that it is not the devil here. Devils come from the sky but when aiming at them do not aim at yourself.” It says all this and the troopers stop crying. It says, quiet, “I do not even know this, not truly, but I need you to know this. It will die for you to live.” It feels suffocating panic, for a moment. It cannot breathe.

It does not go back. The troopers can recover without it, and it prefers Poe’s company anyway. It tries and it tries and maybe someday it will recover. It will be human, fully, and some days it will still wake with the sense of orders of commands of no free will creeping over its tongue but it will breathe and it will be human.


End file.
